DJT's mixed-bag week (so far)

There is his doubling down on the exhortation for - who, exactly? the FCC? - to yank NBC's "license." What kinds of licenses do networks have? I understand that it's a straightforward arrangement for individual stations, but how would this work at the network level?

Which led to Senator Ben Sasse asking on Twitter if DJT was recanting the vow he took last January to uphold the Constitution - and, by inference, the First Amendment.

Some have suggested that Sasse lowers himself getting preoccupied with this. Others say that he distinguishes himself by being the first and, so far, only Senator to step forward and express alarm at how far Trump has pushed the envelope on this.

What we do know is that Squirrel-Hair's slavish toady Sean Hannity now says that he regrets ever having supported Sasse.

Then there are divergent views - within the conservative pundit-sphere - on whether that NBC report was a complete fabrication or just a fairly factual account laced with the inevitable left-leaning spin.

The above-linked Red State piece by strieff flat-out calls it false:

I say blatantly false because Secretary of Defense James Mattis said it was false and I don’t think Mattis needs or wants any job bad enough to burn down a reputation he has built over four decades (some here though will disagree and have done so).

But at Commentary, Noah Rothman  takes a starkly opposite view:

Contrary to the president’s protestations and a denial by Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the report is compelling and thoroughly sourced. That’s the problem.

According to NBC’s report, to which five reporters contributed and which was sourced to “three officials who were in the room,” Trump wants more nuclear warheads. Trump was confronted with a graphic that demonstrated how the United States nuclear warhead stockpile had declined since 1967—when, at its height, the U.S. had more than 32,000 nuclear warheads. Today, by contrast, the U.S. has only 7,000 weapons, approximately 4,000 of which are deployable. The president then reportedly “indicated” he wanted to see a much bigger stockpile.

Would we have to get inside the general's head to ascertain exactly what's true and false, or can corroboration or denial from one of the other officials in the room ever be expected to become public?

Then there is the tweet telling Puerto Rico that FEMA won't be on the ground forever and, by the way, there's still the endemic mismanagement and corruption to be dealt with. This, while the island is still 80 percent without power and huge numbers of citizens don't have clean water.

Here's one from the excellent-policy-highly-questionable-way-of-implementing-it file: Yes, it's great that health insurance plans will now be able to be purchased across state lines, but doing it by executive order perpetuates the extra-Constitutional murkiness that we didn't like when the Most Equal Comrade did it.

Now, I doubt if this one originated within DJT's very good brain, but someone did the right thing big-time by orchestrating the US pullout from UNESCO. One less front within the utterly worthless UN on which we have to have any ties to anti-Israel bias.

This is the ongoing benefit of not having voted for the guy: I don't have to own any of the cringe-inducing stuff, but can heartily applaud the good policy moves.